When you lather up your locks in the shower, or blast the mucky kitchen bench with antibacterial spray, the chemicals in those common household products eventually make their way down the drain and into the environment.

Pretty much everything washed down household drains in Australia goes to a wastewater treatment plant where most particles and chemicals are removed or diluted, and then the water is discharged into our waterways.

However, these days the treatment processes are insufficient to deal with the influx of chemical cocktails, especially the chemicals that last for a very long time, according to chemical engineer Peter Scales from the University of Melbourne.

Eco-unfriendly chemicals:

Plasticisers and BPA: Chemicals that make plastics strong and flexible can accumulate in aquatic sediments, becoming toxic to microbes and animals at high levels, and they also leach out of microplastics.

Antibacterials: Bacteria-killing compounds — like triclosan — can damage the microbial communities in ecosystems and hinder biological water treatment processes.

Surfactants: These are the compounds that give your soap its bubbles. They are often diluted in the wastewater treatment process, but can accumulate at levels toxic to animals in the environment.

EDCs: Endocrine disrupting chemicals can impact the sex and reproductive success of marine animals including snails and fish in waterways. EDCs are found in multiple groups of chemicals. For example BPA, phthalate plasticisers, and the chemicals in fragrances can be hormone-disrupting.

"The concentration that gets through is still too high for the environment," Professor Scales said.

Some of the chemicals in everyday products that can hurt the environment include plasticisers, surfactants, antibacterial agents, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, phosphates and fragrances.

Many of us choose to buy "eco-friendly" household products to minimise our environmental footprint. But are brands labelled "green" or "eco-friendly" really more sustainable than others?

Green, maybe, but not transparent

The marketing claims made on the packaging of household products might not refer to the contents of the product itself, but rather the company as a whole, according to PhD student Rachel Wakefield-Rann from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney.

While a lot companies have proactive, sustainable policies or corporate and social sustainability programs, it's often focused around a very specific definition of sustainability that is about energy, water and waste, Ms Wakefield-Rann said.

"A lot of the claims made on the bottles relate to the activities in broader corporate areas, not the product itself," she said.

And even if the "eco" marketing does relate to the contents, there are still compounds that companies don't have to disclose at all — like fragrances.

According to Ms Wakefield-Rann a "huge amount of fragrances are endocrine-disrupting", which means they can trick our — and other animals' — hormone receptors into acting abnormally.

Research into the effects of chemicals often only begins once it's in products on the market.

Pixabay: Gadini

Another reason labels can be misleading is that when they claim to exclude one specific chemical, they may have just replaced it with another chemical with a different name.

"They become aware of one chemical that's a problem and then we start banning that from products, but we still want the product to function in exactly the same way," Ms Wakefield-Rann said.

"So manufacturers find another chemical that looks and smells and acts in the same way, but hasn't had as much research done on it.

"Then the research starts to be done and they realise that the replacement chemical is just as problematic."

Ms Wakefield-Rann says that this problem in the industry is so ubiquitous that it has its own name — "regrettable substitution" — and that it highlights the need to look at broader classes of chemicals, not individual compounds, when it comes to labelling and regulating.

One example of regrettable substitution is with the compound bisphenol A, or BPA as you may know it, which can leach into the environment through wastewater and in microplastics.

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